Indus city planning

The pattern

The characteristic Indus settlement has two parts: a smaller raised mound to the west, often walled, carrying larger structures; and a larger lower town to the east, laid out on streets running approximately north-south and east-west that divide it into blocks.

Houses front onto lanes rather than main streets, present blank walls outward, and are arranged around internal courtyards. Most have a well, a bathing platform and a drain connecting to the street system.

Standardisation

Baked brick across the Indus zone follows a consistent proportion of roughly 1:2:4, and the sizes cluster around a small number of standards. Weights follow a binary system with the same units at sites hundreds of kilometres apart. Drain construction, street widths and house layouts recur.

This degree of consistency over an area larger than contemporary Egypt or Mesopotamia is the strongest evidence for some form of shared authority or convention, and it is difficult to explain by trade alone.

Variation

The textbook description overstates the uniformity. Dholavira has three divisions rather than two and is built of stone. Banawali's citadel is not separated from the lower town in the usual way, and its streets are not strictly gridded. Lothal has a different arrangement again. The plans are recognisably related rather than identical, and recent work has emphasised regional variation against the earlier picture of monotonous uniformity.

The absent institutions

What is missing is as notable as what is present. No palace, no temple, no royal tomb, no monumental sculpture of a ruler, no fortification designed for serious warfare, and no depiction of an army or a conquest.

Whatever coordinated the brick standards and laid out the streets left no image of itself, which is why Indus political organisation remains genuinely open — proposals range from a centralised state to a confederation of merchant oligarchies to something without a modern parallel.